The New Masculinity

Over the course of recent months, AskMen’s Great Male Survey polled over 87,000 men in the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom on a wide variety of lifestyle-related issues. Ranging from dating and sex to money and power, through to climate change and MMA, our questions provided the guys we polled with an opportunity to share their views on what it means to be a man in the modern Western world.

Now collected, compiled and analyzed, the results of the survey suggest that modern-day manhood is made up of a range of discernible characteristics, some well-established and some still in emergence. More specifically, our findings indicate that “the new masculinity” is a combination of, on the one hand, “old-school” values such as honor, loyalty and hard work and, on the other hand, a more contemporary set of beliefs about gender roles at a time when they are changing both at home and on the job.

Below we walk our readers through some of the survey’s most interesting and, indeed, intriguing results in an effort to present an up-to-date account of what we know, and what we don’t know, about men today and the new masculinity.

The New Masculinity: Context

The face of power and privilege in the West is still, by and large, a male one. If this is so, then why, one might ask, does there appear to be such widespread concern over the long-term fate of boys and men? At least part of this concern can, it seems, be tied to recent trends in the mainstream media. Take, for instance, the world of film.

Over the course of the last 10 years, Kevin Smith-style comedies have proliferated at a rapid rate and have made unengaged and unmotivated guys who play video games all day, live on a steady diet of fast food and watch mammoth quantities of online porn look like the norm. Usually shown to have little in the way of paid employment or familial responsibility, the characters in films like these are likely to give many cause for concern over the future of Western males.

Like the world of film, the world of television — and particularly television advertising — has created its own version of the failed modern-day man: the stupid guy. If, as researchers Judy Aulette, Judith Wittner and Kristin Blakely report, advertising in the 20th century once tended to portray men as standard-bearers, lovers, workers, and rugged individualists, then at the dawn of the post-millennium one might say that an additional category is required to accommodate the bumbling, fumbling, stupid guys.

Of course, media representations alone do not account for why so many are now sounding the alarm. From psychologists to sociologists through to social workers and law enforcement officers, experts from across the disciplines are expressing worry over what physician Leonard Sax is calling an epidemic of underachieving and underperforming young men. And there appears to be good reason for their worry, as many of the bastions of male dominance are starting to disappear.